This article reexamines Coppinger and Rosenblatt’s (1968) finding that romantic love insures marital stability where there is low subsistence dependence between the spouses. Analysis suggests that Coppinger and Rosenblatt’s associated variables, romantic love and subsistence dependence, are only related through their common association with subsistence technology.

This article explores the relationship between marital residence and romantic love; results suggest that romantic love is most important in societies with non-neolocal marital residence. The author explores potential functions of romantic love, including bolstering against the divisive pressure of relatives, or to substitute for economic interdependence between spouses.

This study negates the hypothesis that romantic love is unique to Euro-American culture and provides evidence of romantic love in the majority of cultures sampled.

This study examines the relationship between satisfaction of early oral and dependence needs and concern with affection in adulthood. Data showed significant support for an association between the satisfaction of early oral needs (but not the satisfaction of dependence needs) and concern for affection in adulthood.

Previous cross-cultural studies of romantic love have, in the authors' view, been plagued by vague definitions of the concept and a conflation of cultural, bio-psychological, and social factors. Thus, the authors distinguish between the social aspect of romantic love (which they argue is a universal human predisposition) and the variable cultural valuation of romance. In a large cross-cultural sample, the authors test the hypotheses that gender equality and family organization are important predictors of the cultural valuation of romantic love.

This paper presents research on the factors that promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies. After a discussion of the previous literature on romantic love in ethnographic societies, the authors used the SCCS, EA, and data from eHRAF to create a data set of 109 cultures and then utilized multiple ordinal regression to test the relationship between different types of families and post-marital residence practices and the importance of romantic love in marriage. The findings show that monogamy is significantly correlated with romantic love, while nuclear family organization and neolocal post-marital residence are not significantly correlated. The presence of polygyny is found to lower the probability of romantic love being a basis for marriage. These findings contradict previous research, which found a relationship between non-neolocal post-marital residence and the presence of romantic love in marriage.

Previous cross-cultural studies of romantic love have, in the authors' view, been plagued by vague definitions of the concept and a conflation of cultural, bio-psychological, and social factors. Thus, the authors distinguish between the social aspect of romantic love (which they argue is a universal human predisposition) and the variable cultural valuation of romance. In a large cross-cultural sample, the authors test the hypotheses that gender equality and family organization are important predictors of the cultural valuation of romantic love.

This article examines the relationships between family structure, type of mate-selection system, and romantic love as a basis for mate-selection. Analysis indicates that autonomous mate selection is more common in societies with nuclear family structure and neolocal residence patterns. Romantic love as a basis for mate selection is also more common with nuclear family organization, but it is negatively associated with neolocal residence patterns.

This paper presents research on the factors that promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies. After a discussion of the previous literature on romantic love in ethnographic societies, the authors used the SCCS, EA, and data from eHRAF to create a data set of 109 cultures and then utilized multiple ordinal regression to test the relationship between different types of families and post-marital residence practices and the importance of romantic love in marriage. The findings show that monogamy is significantly correlated with romantic love, while nuclear family organization and neolocal post-marital residence are not significantly correlated. The presence of polygyny is found to lower the probability of romantic love being a basis for marriage. These findings contradict previous research, which found a relationship between non-neolocal post-marital residence and the presence of romantic love in marriage.

Based on work by Rosenblatt (1966), this article tests a hypothesis relating sexual freedom to romantic love. Findings suggest a relationship between premarital and extramarital sexual permissiveness equality for women and men and romantic love.